Children's Mobilities

Interdependent, Imagined, Relational

Lesley Murray, Susana Cortés-Morales

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781137521132
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137521149
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a critical and comprehensive analysis of children's mobilities by focusing on its interdependent, imagined and relational aspects. In doing so, it challenges existing literature, which, in mobilities studies, tends to overlook the mobilities of marginalised social groups; in social science more generally, tends to immobilize children's studies; and in children's mobility studies has mainly focused on the 'independent' and corporeal travel of children. The book situates children's mobilities in wider contexts, offering an interdisciplinary and critical perspective throughout and drawing on scholarship at the confluence of childhood and mobilities and a range of research to offer new insights that inform the field of mobilities and studies of childhood. In this way, the book aims at widening the perspective on children's mobility towards the inclusion of diverse age groups and of the manifold forms of mobilities that are part of children's lives, from an interdependent and relational point of view.

© The Author(s) 2019

Lesley Murray and Susana Cortés-MoralesChildren's Mobilitieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52114-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Relational, Interdependent, Imagined Mobilities

Lesley Murray¹ and Susana Cortés-Morales²

(1)

School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

(2)

School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Lesley Murray (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Susana Cortés-Morales

End Abstract

When Robert Williams was 13, he stole a bus. In an interview with the BBC (2017), Robert tells his story. The son of a single mother with health issues who had two jobs, Robert imagined ways to help out his family from an early age. Living in a run-down part of Louisville, Kentucky, one of the highlights of his childhood was talking with the school bus driver who showed interest in his life. Being a bus driver, seemed to him a respectable profession, even more so than the police or fire service which had few black employees so he was less able to relate to them. So, one day Robert stitched a badge made from tinfoil onto his church clothes and one of his father’s caps. He walked to the bus dept, got on a number 19 bus and used the knowledge gained from watching the school bus driver, to start the bus and drive off out of the depot and down a main road. He was quickly stopped by a roadblock formed out of buses and police cars and arrested at gunpoint. When he went to court, he told the judge his story, of how he just wanted to be a bus driver. The bus company, the Transit Authority of River City (TARC), on hearing this in court, said that he could have a job when he was 25. Robert has now worked as a bus driver and then supervisor for TARC for 15 years.

In many ways, Robert’s is the story of children’s mobilities. It reflects the ways in which his mobilities are interdependent, relational and imagined. Robert spent his childhood in a district of a city in which opportunities were limited, and from which he dreamt of being more mobile, of a better life. He looked forward, to a time in his life when he would be able to earn an income to help with his family. He tried to manipulate time, to disturb the linear path of childhood that determines what children can and cannot do. Despite institutional, social and political constraints, he demonstrated agency in both his imagined and corporeal mobilities, an agency that was not autonomous, but relational. In his interview, he looked back, at a mobile life as imagined, from his positioning as now adult. He now affords others a mobility that perhaps is not available by other means, in a country in which the majority of bus riders in cities are black, Asian and minority ethnic (Clark 2017), in a city infamous for its part in the movement of slaves in the nineteenth century and in which spatial segregation endures (Mock 2017). As Holdsworth (2014: 421) argues, ‘the very reference to children’s mobility suggests a particular form of movement that is distinctive from adult practices, yet is still constrained by and performed within adultist spaces’.

This account also raises the fundamental issue of focusing on children’s mobilities, as a discrete field of study. As Hammersley (2017) points out parallels can be drawn here with ‘women’s’ studies and the essentialising of particular subjects. But this story is also not only a tale of children’s mobilities but of mobilities. It may seem that a book about children’s mobilities is specific to children, that children’s mobilities are discrete, that children are open to movement in ways that adults are not. But it is not possible to separate the mobilities of children from other people’s mobilities. Nor is it possible to disconnect children’s mobilities from time, space and materialities. As childhood is relational and as mobilities are relational, so too are children’s mobilities. By relational, we mean that children’s mobilities are constituted through relations between them and other people, spaces, times, materials, imaginings, etc. The task, in this book, is to determine the scope and character of this relationality. This is dependent on a range of factors of course, not least the navigation of power relationships between children and adults. As a result of the uneven distribution of power, children’s mobilities are particular to children. This positioning of childhood in relation to adults is rooted, not only in present ‘constellations of mobilities’ (Cresswell 2011) but also in historical and future conceptualisations and historical and future imaginations of childhood and society—or ‘constellations of childhood’ (Cortés-Morales 2015). Such conceptualisations have propelled research on children’s mobility down a certain path that we analyse here, but we also aim at discussing and suggesting other possible paths.

We approach childhood and children’s mobilities from a mobilities perspective (Cresswell 2006, 2011; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007). This means that for us, children’s mobilities are contingent on a set of interweaving aspects of mobilities that are bound together in fluid and uneven interdependencies. Often children’s mobilities are studied through ‘work that largely focuses on the tension between the declining use of active transport in the west and the increasing prevalence of sedentary behaviour, physical inactivity, and obesity among children and youth’ (Buliung et al. 2012: 31). Here, mobilities are constituted by manifold forms of movement, not only physical travel, which the study of children’s mobility has remained focused on, but the intersecting movement of bodies, objects, spaces, ideas, communications and representations. This is illustrated in the comic strip story that runs through the book—‘Making family mobilities’—which depicts the interdependent mobilities of a family and their friends over a two-year period (Fig. 1.1). Children’s mobility is highly significant within a broader understanding of mobilities, yet it is underexplored and under theorised. By seeking a more comprehensive understanding of the myriad aspects of children’s mobilities, we then contribute to not only broader understandings of mobilities, but to the critical understanding of childhood. We are not seeking to necessarily ‘go beyond’ existing social theories of childhood—although we often take as our starting point the ‘new social studies of childhood’ (James et al. 1998) and sociology of childhood (Leonard 2016)—but to take the study of childhood in a slightly different direction and look at it from another angle. In taking a critical approach, we contest certain aspects of existing approaches, including our own previous interpretations. Chapter 2 therefore situates children’s mobilities in wider context, explicating the key debates in children’s studies and in mobilities as well as overviewing relevant literature from across disciplines.

Fig. 1.1

Comic story 1

We follow on from this, in Chapter 3, by considering the ways in which these conceptualisations have been incorporated into varying approaches to researching children’s mobilities. It is here (understandably as we are researchers) that our contentions around interdependency and relationality begin to be more fully illuminated. This chapter explores a range of methodological and epistemological issues relating to research around children’s mobility. In doing so, the chapter considers how methodological approaches that focus solely on children, the ‘Charlie Brown approach’ might lead to an unfinished, incomplete picture. Drawing from case studies of empirical research, the chapter critically evaluates the range of methods that have been applied in grasping the embodied nature of children’s mobilities and the range of contexts in which they are situated, including visual (Murray 2009; Pink 2007, 2015) and mobile (Büscher et al. 2010; Fincham et al. 2010).

There has been scholarship on children’s mobilities and a growing body of work that adopts a critical mobilities approach to children’s mobilities (Mikkelsen and Christensen 2009; Kullman 2010; Kullman and Palludan 2011; Nansen et al. 2015). We are not seeking to detail every aspect of children’s mobilities, but to develop an argument about how they are relational, imagined and interdependent. The significance of historical welfare reforms to our understanding of childhood has, among other factors, led to a focus on mobilities associated with the school and school-age children. We aim to understand how aspects of children’s mobilities that have been ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Relational, Interdependent, Imagined Mobilities
• 2. Conceptualising Children’s Mobilities
• 3. Researching Children’s Mobilities
• 4. Zooming In, Zooming Out: The Forms and Scales of Children’s Mobilities
• 5. Children’s Mobilities in Time
• 6. Children’s Imagined Mobilities
• 7. Stagings, Interdependencies and Co-mobilities
• 8. Children’s Mobile Relationalities
• Correction to: Children’s Mobilities
• Back Matter